There Goes the NeighborhoodLos Angeles is having an identity crisis. City officials tout new development and shiny commuter trains, while longtime residents are doing all they can to hang on to home. The series is supported by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.

Chapter One

MANIFEST
DESTINY

FRONTISPIECE

In the drawing Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty stand side by side on the shore.
We see them from behind, but know, by their dress, whose pensive vista we
are sharing.

There is a breeze coming in, the flame from the Lady's torch, held tentatively
at her hip, blowing toward us slightly. The vast ocean stretches before
them, and the sun, rays crepuscular on the rolling waves, is only a sliver
above the far horizon. Filling the darkening sky above and dominating the
page is a question mark.

We are looking west.

We can't see their faces, of course, can't tell if they are seeking adventure,
longing for treasure, anticipating unknown horrors. That will come later.

GOLD FEVER

Hod is the first on deck to see smoke.

"That must be it," he says, pointing ahead to where the mountains rise
up and pinch together to close off the channel. "Dyea."

There is a rush then, stampeders running to the fore and jostling for
position, climbing onto the bales of cargo lashed to the deck to see over the
crush, herding at a rumor as they have since the Utopia pulled away from the
cheering throngs in Seattle, panicked that someone else might get there first.
Store clerks and farmers, teamsters and railroad hands, failed proprietors
and adventurous college boys and scheming hucksters and not a few fellow
refugees from the underground. Hod has done every donkey job to be had in
a mine, timbering, mucking ore with shovel and cart, laying track, single-jacking
shoot holes with a hand auger. He knows how to look for colors in
a riverbank, knows what is likely worth the sweat of digging out and what
isn't. But the look in the eyes of the men crowding him up the gangplank,
the press of the hungry, goldstruck mass of them, five days jammed shoulder-to-shoulder
at the rail of the steamer dodging hot cinders from the stack, half
of them sick and feeding the fish or groaning below in their bunks as the
other half watch the islands slide by and share rumors and warnings about a
land none have ever set foot on—he understands that it will be luck and not
skill that brings fortune in the North.

Though skill might keep you alive through the winter.

"Store clerk outta Missouri, wouldn't know a mineshaft from a hole in
the ground, wanders off the trail to relieve himself? Stubs his toe on a nugget
big as a turkey egg."

"You pay gold dust for whatever you need up there—won't take no paper
money or stamped coin. Every night at closing they sweep the barroom
floors, there's twenty, thirty dollars in gold they sift outta the sawdust."

"Canadian Mounties sittin up at the top of the Pass got a weigh station.
It's a full ton of provisions, what they think should stand you for a year, or
no dice. Couple ounces shy and them red-jacketed sonsabitches'll turn you
back."

"Put a little whiskey in your canteen with the water so it don't freeze."

"Hell, put a little whiskey in your bloodstream so you don't freeze. Teetotaller
won't make it halfway through September in the Yukon."

"Indins up there been pacified a long time now. It's the wolves you need
to steer clear of."

"The thing is, brother, if you can hit it and hold on to it, you float up into
a whole nother world. Any time you pass an opera house west of the Rockies,
the name on it belongs to another clueless pilgrim what stumbled on a jackpot.
This Yukon is the last place on earth the game aint been rigged yet."

If the game isn't rigged in Dyea it is not for lack of trying.

There is no dock at the mouth of the river, greenhorns shouting in protest
as their provisions are dumped roughly onto lighters from the anchored
steamer, shouting more as they leap or are shoved down from the deck to
ferry in with the goods and shouting still to see them hurled from the lighters
onto the mudflats that lead back to the raw little camp, deckhands heaving
sacks and crates and bundles with no regard for ownership or fragility,
and then every man for himself to haul his scattered outfit to higher ground
before the seawater can ruin it.

"Fifty bucks I give you a hand with that," says a rum-reeking local with
tobacco stain in his beard.

"Heard it was twenty." Hod with his arms full, one hand pressed to cover
a tear in a sack of flour.

"Outgoing tide it's twenty. When she's rolling in like this—" the local
grins, spits red juice onto the wet stones, "—well, it sorter follows the law
of supply and demand." Hod takes a moment too long to consider and loses
the porter to a huffing Swede who offers fifty-five. Left to his own, he hustles
back and forth to build a small mountain of his food and gear on a hummock
by a fresh-cut tree stump, crashing into other burdened stampeders in the
mad scramble, gulls wheeling noisily overhead in the darkening sky, little
channel waves licking his boots on the last trip then three dry steps before
he collapses exhausted on his pile.

When he gets his breath back Hod sits up to see where he's landed. There
are eagles, not so noble-looking as the ones that spread their wings on the
coins and bills of the nation, eagles skulking on the riverbank, eagles thick
in the trees back from the mudflats. He has never seen a live one before.

"They'll get into your sowbelly, you leave it out in the open," says the
leathery one-eyed Indian who squats by his load.

"I don't plan to."

"Better get a move on, then. That tide don't stay where it is."

The man introduces himself as Joe Raven and is something called a Tlingit
and there is no bargaining with him.

"Twelve cents a pound. Healy and Wilson charge you twice that. Be two
hundred fifty to pack this whole mess to the base of the Pass. We leave at
first light."

It is already late in the season, no time to waste lugging supplies piecemeal
from camp to camp when the lakes are near freezing and the goldfields
will soon be picked over. All around them Indians and the scruffy-bearded
local white men are auctioning their services off to the highest bidder. One
stampeder runs frantically from group to group, shouting numbers, looking
like he'll pop if he's not the first to get his stake off the beach.

"That's about all the money I got," says Hod.

The Tlingit winks his good eye and begins to pile Hod's goods onto a
runnerless sledge. "Hauling this much grub, you won't starve right away."
He tosses a stone at an eagle sidling close and it flaps off a few yards, croaking
with annoyance, before settling onto the flats again.

"Eat on a dead dog, eat the eyes out of spawn fish, pick through horseshit
if it's fresh. Lazy bastards." Joe Raven winks his single eye again. "Just like
us Tlingits."

The Indian wakes him well before first light.

"Best get on the trail," he says, "before it jams up with people."

Hod rises stiffly, the night spent sleeping in fits out with his goods,
laughter and cursing and a few gunshots drifting over from the jumble of
raw wood shanties and smoke-grimed tents that have spread, scabies-like, a
few hundred yards in from the riverbank.

"Any chance for breakfast in town?"

"The less you have to do with that mess," says Joe Raven, "the better off
you be."

As they head out there are eagles still, filling the trees, sleeping.

The eight miles from Dyea to Canyon City is relatively flat but rough
enough, Hod's outfit loaded on the backs of Joe's brothers and wives and
cousins and grinning little nephews, a sly-eyed bunch who break out a greasy
deck of cards whenever they pause to rest or to let Hod catch up. Fortunes, or
at least the day's wages, pass back and forth with much ribbing in a language
he can't catch the rhythm of. Hod struggles along with his own unbalanced
load, clambering over felled trees and jagged boulders bigger than any he's
ever seen, saving ten dollars and raising a crop of angry blisters on his feet as
the trail winds through a narrow canyon, skirting the river then wandering
away from it.

"Boots 'pear a tad big for you," says Joe Raven.

The way he has to cock his head to focus the one eye on you, Hod can't
tell if the Indian is mocking him or not.

"Might be." He is trying not to limp, trying desperately to keep up.

"Don't worry. By tomorrow your feet'll swoll up to fill em."

Canyon City is only another junkheap of tents and baggage near a waterfall.
Hod forks over two fresh-minted silver dollars for hot biscuits and a
fried egg served on a plate not completely scraped clean of the last man's
lunch while the Indians sit on their loads outside and chew on dried moose,
taking up the cards again.

"Gamblingest sonsabitches I ever seen," says the grizzled packer sitting
by him on the bench in the grub tent. "Worse than Chinamen."

"I'm paying twelve cents a pound," says Hod. The coffee is bitter but hot
off the stovetop. "That fair?"

The packer looks him over and Hod flushes, aware of just how new all his
clothes are. "What's fair is whatever one fella is willin to pay and another is
willin to do the job for at the moment," says the man, biscuit crumbs clinging
to his stubble. "Three months ago that egg'd cost you five dollars. Just
a matter of what you want and how bad you want it."

After Canyon City the trail starts to rise, Hod lagging farther behind the
Tlingits and thinking seriously about what he might dump and come back
for later. There are discarded goods marking both sides of the path, things
people have decided they can survive without in the wilderness beyond, some
with price tags still attached.

"We maybe pick these up on the way back," says Joe Raven, lagging
to check on Hod's progress. "Sell em to the next boatload of greenhorns
come in."

A small, legless piano lays in the crook of a bend in the trail, and Hod
can't resist stopping to toe a couple muffled, forlorn notes with his boot.

"Man could haul that over far as Dawson and play it, be worth its weight
in gold," says Joe, and then is gone up the trail.

The light begins to fade and the Indians pull far ahead. Whenever Hod
thinks he's caught up he finds only another group of trudging pilgrims who
report not to have seen them. He staggers on, over and around the deadfall,
searching for footprints in the early snow. I'm a fool and a tenderfoot,
he thinks, heart sinking. They've stolen it all and I'll be the laugh of the
north country. It is dark and steep and slippery, his pack rubbing the skin
off his back and his feet screaming with every step when he stumbles into
the lot of them, smoking and laughing in a lantern-lit circle around the
dog-eared cards.

"Another mile up to Sheep Camp," mutters Joe Raven, barely looking up
from the game. "Gonna blow heavy tonight, so we best skedaddle."

If he takes his load off for a moment he'll never be able to hoist it again.
"Let me just catch my breath," says Hod, holding on to a sapling to keep
himself from sliding back down the incline while the Indians gather the rest
of his outfit onto their backs.

"You doing pretty good for a cheechako," Joe tells him, adjusting the
deer-hide tumpline across his forehead. "We had one, his heart give out right
about this section. Had to pack him back to Dyea, sell his goods to raise the
passage home. Somewhere called Iowa, they said his body went."

The night wind catches them halfway up to Sheep Camp, and when the
sharper at the entrance asks Hod for two dollars to collapse, still dressed,
onto a carpet of spruce boughs covered with canvas in a flapping tent shared
with a dozen other men, he hands it over without comment.

In his sleep Hod walks ten miles, uphill and with a load on his back.

"We take you to the Stairs, but we don't climb," says Joe Raven as they dump
his goods next to a hundred other piles in the little flat area at the bottom of
the big slope. "Too many fresh suckers comin in to Dyea every day to bother
with this mess."

The last of the tall spruce and alder dealt out yesterday evening, only a
handful of wind-stunted dwarf trees left along the trek from Sheep Camp
to the Stairs, and now nothing but a wall of rock and snowfield faces them,
near vertical, all the way to the summit. There is a black line of pack-hauling
pilgrims already crawling up the steps chopped into the ice, and here on the
flat ground an ever-growing mob of adventurers crowded around a pair of
freightage scales to weigh their outfits before starting the climb.

"You aint that short, buddy," says another man, a stampeder from the
look of him, pale yellow stubble on his face and pale eyes, one blue, one
green, and pale skin made raw from the weather. "You can pick up twice that
weight from what's been cast away on the trip up."

He says his name is Whitey, just Whitey, and that he's from Missouri
and has been waiting here since yesterday, searching for a face he can trust.

"The deal with this Chilkoot," he says, "is you always got to have one
man mindin the store while the other carries the next lot up, then you switch
off. It's simple mathematics."

Whitey shows Hod his own pile, the same goods bought for the same
double prices from the same outfitters in Seattle. "One load comes from your
pile, then the next from mine. It don't matter who carries what, we both do
the same amount of work and both get to spell ourselves at the top while the
other climbs. It gets dark, one of us stays up there with what we've carried
and the other down here with what's left. We'll get her done in half the time
and won't be wore out for the rest of it."

It sounds good enough to Hod. They help each other load up, making
packs with rope and canvas and tying on near seventy pounds apiece for the
first trip.

"No matter how weary you get, don't step out of line to rest once you're on
them Golden Stairs," says Whitey as they nudge their way into the crowd of
men at the base of the footpath. "Takes a good long spell to squeeze back in."

They start up, Whitey climbing a half-dozen men above Hod. The blasting
cold air and the hazardous footing and the weight on Hod's back drives
all thought away, his whole life tunneling down to the bend of the knees of
the man in front of him, left, now right, now left, thigh muscles knotting as
he follows in step, keeping count at first, step after slippery step, then giving
up when the idea of the thousands more ahead proves unbearable.

The first thing left by the stairs is a huge cook pot, iron rusted a different
color on its uphill side, that looks to have been there some while.
Then wooden boxes and crates, dozens of them, and who has the energy
to stop and look inside as the wind cuts sharp across the face of the slope,
and next it is men littering the sides of the line of climbers, some bent
over with exhaustion or waiting for a moment's gap to rejoin the file, others
splayed out on the mountain face with their heels dug in to keep from
sliding, helpless as tipped turtles with their pack harnesses up around their
necks, weeping.